Recruiting.com is a free search engine with some optional paid services, that assists recruiters with finding publicly-available resumes and profiles.  There are two options for searching:  general resume searching and/or professional networking profiles (which seem to mostly come from Linkedin).

It’s easy enough to use.  Just type in your key words and select one or both of the search parameters and off you go!  It does yield some good leads and might prove helpful in speeding up some of your Boolean searches.

According to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent message, Facebook will be removing regional networks completely.  Does this mean it will be easier for recruiters to search for talent?  It seems as though it will allow us to yield more results in our searches, however, we will still be required to send a message or a request to connect.

Also, users will continue to have complete control over their privacy settings.  How an individual user sets their privacy settings will determine whether they will be findable in searches.

With more than 350 million registered users, we can’t ignore Facebook as a valuable source.  There are other ways to interact with users.

1.  Join Fan Pages and interact with users directly via the Fan Page.

2.  Join Groups and interact with users directly via the group.

3.  Create your own niche Fan Page or Group and grow your own community.

You don’t need to be connected in order to contact a potential candidate on Linkedin!  All you need to do is:

1.  look at the groups on the targeted individual’s profile,

2.  join one of the groups that they are a member of,

3.  directly e-mail them!

Once you join the group, you will see the “group” icon beside the person’s name.  Click the send message icon on the right side of the person’s profile and a window will open in which you will type your direct message!  This is also a great way to save your Inmail messages, if you have a paid account.

Site searching Twitter can yield some good results.  Copy and paste the search strings below into Google. (Replace my key words).

site:twitter.com “medical device” -recruiter -job

site:twitter.com accountant (resume OR vitae) –recruiter

site:twitter.com biotechnology (resume OR vitae) –job

site:twitter.com “i’m a registered nurse”

site:twitter.com biotechnology “product development” –job

site:twitter.com accountant cpa -job –jobs

site:twitter.com “i am a civil engineer“

site:twitter.com oracle “my resume“

site:twitter.com php “my resume“

site:twitter.com #sql “my resume“

Below is a good search string for Google.com.  This string is specific to locating resumes and cv’s and not just names.  Replace the word “keyword” with your search terms.

(intitle:”resume for” OR intitle:”resume of” OR intitle:”Curriculum Vitae” OR intitle:”’s resume”) keywords -intitle:example -intitle:examples -intitle:sample -intitle:submit

“This is another official update to the original “Shift Happens” video. This completely new Fall 2009 version includes facts and stats focusing on the changing media landscape, including convergence”

According to Wikipedia, A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

Wordle.net is a free site where you can easily create tag clouds.

This is my resume transformed into a tag cloud.  It is remarkably accurate.  This technology will assist you with understanding how search engine relevancy works.

Great video about social media!

Here is the information in the video:

• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth has now become world of mouth.

• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services – they will find us via social media.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first, selling second.
• Successful companies in social media also act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser.
• Twenty-four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because the Web is now the primary news source.
• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers – 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
  • Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
  • Social Media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
  • Three out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
  • Years to reach 50 million users:
    • Radio – 38 years
    • TV – 13 years
    • The Internet – four years
    • iPod – three years
    • Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.
    • iPhone applications hit one billion in nine months.
    • If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s fourth largest – between the United States and Indonesia.
      • More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook – daily.
      • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
      • Some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using its services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this).
      • Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than four weeks and cost Facebook $0.
      • comScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the number one Russian social network.
      • A 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. One-in-six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
      • Percentage of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80 percent.
      • Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime. Company reputations are often killed before the company even knows it is bleeding.
        • Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
        • There are no secrets in social media – ask any job applicant who didn’t get hired because of those college party pictures on Facebook or Flickr.
        • The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
        • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78 percent of those articles are written in languages other than English.
          • If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipediayou would earn $156.23 per hour.
          • There are over 200,000,000 blogs and 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
          • Twenty-five percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
          • People care more about how their social networks ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.
          • Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations
            • Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
            • Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment.
            • Ninety percent of people that can skip ads using TiVo do so.
            • Hulu (the online video site) has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
            • In the past month, 25 percent of Americans said they watched a short video – on their phone.
            • According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.

People that register on Google and Yahoo! to use their applications are offered the opportunity to create a profile.

There are more than 3,430,000 profiles currently listed on Yahoo! and 623,000 on Google. You can surface talent by x-raying these sites.  Use these search strings (modify the keywords to match your needs):

Google:                  site:google.com/profiles engineer

Yahoo!:                 site:profiles.yahoo.com engineer

Resume builder sites, used to create a job seekers online identity, are surfacing all over the Internet.  Some of these sites offer the job seeker free exposure (from the site’s domain).  You can site search (or x-ray) the site from Google to surface potential candidates.

Sites to search:  emurse.com, resumebucket.com, zumeo.com, visualcv.com

Google search string example:

site:emurse.com engineer -jobs

(Replace the word “engineer” with your keyword(s).  Also replace the “emurse.com” site with resumebucket.com, etc.)